It can take a long time for your cities in Old World to finish whatever they’re doing. Whether you’re producing a worker, a scout, a military unit, walls, a treasury, or a gardener for your lavender grove, it can take literally years. Sometimes as many as a dozen! Who has time for that? Which is where hurrying comes in. It’s a tradition in strategy games like this. If you want that settler now, you can have it. So long as you pay extra.
But like many elements of Old World, it doesn’t work like you might expect, and it’s not very well documented. You can puzzle over the tooltips, but the overall concept isn’t explained very well. Here’s what Old World has to say about itself: “Hurrying can be unlocked with Laws, Archetypes, or Family Classes.” Not terribly helpful. So let me explain hurrying in the kind of detail you need to actually take advantage of it.
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Oh, look, half of 2021 is gone already. I hadn’t noticed that it was time to take stock of the best games of the year so far. Note that anything that might have come out on or after July 1st, perhaps distracting me from other things, isn’t eligible. So let’s take a look at the best game of 2021 that came out before midnight, June 30th.
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Families aren’t a discrete system in Old World. They’re also not something you can easily relate to other games you’ve played. They’re not like combat, or income, or technology, or culture, or religion. Instead, they’re all of those things and more. They’re Old World’s middle layer, interacting with the smaller scale of individual characters and the larger scale of strategic gameplay, influencing and influenced on both sides. Think of them as the glue that holds the Civilization IV to the Crusader Kings.
Part of Old World’s brilliance as a design is how it combines its three distinct scales: personal, social, and geopolitical. Imagine a wargame that you play at a tactical, operational, and strategic level. You assign resources to train troops, then you arrange those troops into armies and move them around a map, and then you control individual soldiers as they fight a battle. Crazy, right? It can’t be done! Now imagine you play all three levels simultaneously. Even crazier!
As videogamers, we’re used to designs like Creative Assembly’s Total War series or the X-com model, in which a tactical layer is wrapped in a strategic shell. And we’re even used to games like Civilization V trying to combine a strategy game with a tactical layer of moving units around terrain, shooting arrows over lakes, and taking cover in hills. But Old World combines three separate scales, all woven into the gameplay at the same time, all affecting and affected by each other constantly. Nearly every moment of everything you do in Old World will percolate through its personal, social, and geopolitical gameplay. Families are the social level and today I’d like to break down how they affect the larger scale of developing your cities.
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Mohawk Games’ Old World is finally out of early access today. And if you’re like me and you’ve been waiting for the full release, I should warn you that it might be a bumpy ride. Brace yourself. Is that godawful clattering sound everything falling apart, or is it the rollercoaster being pulled to the top of an impending thrill ride?
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I’ve spent decades denigrating the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre as artless trash. I’m not sure when I first saw it. Probably in college, sometime around 1990. That was also the last time I saw it. Since then, I’ve seen Tobe Hooper’s other movies. I’ve rewatched Invaders from Mars, Lifeforce, Eaten Alive, Funhouse, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel in the last few years, and they’re all varying degrees of horrible (the conventional wisdom about Poltergeist, which is still great, is that Spielberg actually directed it). It’s been my assertion all along that Tobe Hooper is a terrible director, and although there might be something raw and effective in his first movie, it’s artless trash.
I was wrong. So egregiously wrong.
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Necromunda: Hired Gun is the best Spider-Man game since Spider-Man. My magic web-shooter/grappling hook can get me anywhere I can see. A quick thwip and I’m standing on a ledge high overhead! The double-jump assist is just gravy. But unlike Sony’s 2018 love letter to Silver Age superheroics, Hired Gun lives in a grim Warhammer world where I didn’t jump up to this ledge for thrills; I jumped up here to snipe a bunch of crazy dudes sporting plasma rifles, blue Mohawks, and skull flair. Also, I’ve got a dog tagging along and I’m toting serious firepower of my own. Frankly, the dog isn’t much of a dog anymore. When I upgrade him, I swap out his dog parts for robot parts. A paw here, a leg there, one side of his face, a jaw, another leg. He may not be as furry as he used to be, but he’s still a good boy. I summon him with a squeaky toy (Warhammer needs more humorous touches like this). As for the guns, they’re not foolin’ around. This is the Warhammer universe, so they’re absurdly large heavy hitters, even when they’re just pistols. They have names like Deathbringer, Funeral Ball, Burning Sun, and Scars Machina. They take up a lot of screen real estate.
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Ben Wheatley is back in fine form after his brief detour remaking obscure Hitchcock movies!
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We can’t be letting city-slicker criminals murder kids out in the woods. It’s just not right. Fortunately, there are salt-of-the-earth outdoorsman types doing their part, some of whom are even ladies! I consider this a subgenre in thrillers. Movie about criminals in tracts of wilderness going up against people who are better than them at camping and whatnot.
For instance, Those Who Wish Me Dead, a thriller directed by Taylor Sheridan, a square-jawed TV actor who apparently had a drawer full of scripts.
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A colorful post-apocalyptic open world populated by intelligent mutated animals. Tthe usual Ubisoft style open-world with a touch of Gamma World and a Secret of NIMH vibe. Over-the-top brawler gameplay, intricate stat-based character development, and a hearty crafting system. Mounts, vehicles, loot, exploration, puzzles, choice-and-consequence. A robot cricket sidekick! If games were bullet points, Biomutant would have a lot going for it. But since games are games, Biomutant is only as good as the realization of these bullet points.
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Tom Chick finds a game heavier and better than Twilight Struggle, Mike Pollmann finds a mysterious boardgame and now someone is watching him, and Hassan Lopez finds out who would win in a fight between Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes.
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One of my complaints about Phoenix Point is that the stealth is poorly integrated into the game. From my otherwise enthusiastic review:
Combat is very gamey and deterministic, but stealth is all under-the-hood voodoo. You never know whether an alien will see you or not. You can see a stealth number and a perception number, and you can affect these numbers in different ways. You know the interaction of these numbers determines whether someone is visible. But there’s no indication of how the numbers interact. It’s the worst kind of information: presented without any of the context you need to make decisions. There’s no way to make sure your sneaky assassin stays out of sight as he creeps around the map while everyone else is shooting. Stealth is obviously supposed to be a gameplay system in Phoenix Point, which has cloaking suits and noiseless weapons and varying levels of light to affect visibility. But in its current state, it is no such thing. It’s a locked black box, good for stubbing your toe and not much else.
Yet stealth is part of how gear is tuned, which in turn is part of how characters are developed and factions are balanced, both a fundamental element of gameplay progression. Will that change next week? From developer Snapshot Games’ latest blog entry about the May 25th update:
…understanding enemy awareness was important for players trying stealthy maneuvers, and we wanted to help players know when they might be in jeopardy. Enemy perception range is now visualized when hovering over a selected enemy, so you can see which of your soldiers may be at risk.
At least, my infiltrators might actually be able to infiltrate! The new Festering Skies DLC will also be available on May 25th. It adds more stuff for your interceptors to do and a giant alien ship that flies around terrorizing the globe.
Between the three of us, we have at least three full playthroughs of the latest Resident Evil. Join us as we dance awkwardly around spoilers trying not to ruin the story for anyone.
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Remember that time when Resident Evil tried something new and different? Resident Evil 5 cast horror in a new light. Africa’s equatorial sun blew the usual cobwebs out of the series in favor of something different and even controversial. It finally played like the shooter it had been trying to be for so long. It even introduced an exciting new character. And that was back when representation was more a prerequisite for taxation than a cultural imperative. But what’s become of Sheva now? Why does Capcom keep going back to the white-bread familiarity of their Chrises and Jills? Why are they all-in on the tragedy of the faceless Ethan Winters, aptly named for being as bland as the driven snow, searching for his wife and/or daughter the same way he searches for green herbs, handgun rounds, and whatever arbitrary cog, key, or crank handle unlocks the next heavily scripted set piece? Mia, Rose, press X to Jason, all just meat for the refrigerator. The shadow of Silent Hill looms over so many games, yet so few of them understand what made it tick.
Since Resident Evil 5, the series has alternated between updated remixes that work well enough and new stories that have been various levels of awful. Maybe The Village can thread the needle between effective gameplay and a new setting, style, and characters.
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A new action movie from the guy who did Hardcore Henry? Sure! From a script by the guy who wrote John Wick? Of course! With Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk as an action hero? And it’s not even a comedy? How is that going to work?
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Tom Chick is serving up woolly mammoth burgers, Mike Pollmann is gathering “resources”, and Hassan Lopez has moved beyond ghosts.
(We had to use a back-up recording, so apologies for the keyboard noise.)
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